Nvidia CEO sees auto chip, software boom after delayed start

Nvidia’s automotive software and processor sales totaled $566 million last year, just 2% of total sales, but CEO Jensen Huang told reporters this week he’s “quite sure” the vehicle segment “will be our next multibillion dollar business.”

The company has an $11 billion pipeline of contracts in the space over the next six years, up from just $8 billion just a year ago.   

The auto business for Nvidia and top competitors such as Mobileye and more recently Qualcomm has taken longer than expected to develop, but major automakers globally are showing they are onboard and committed to develop electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles in the next three to five years even as they have weathered continued shortages in some chips for conventional vehicles.

Growth in the coming EV and AV markets “has taken longer than expected by about three years,” Huang said. “I am absolutely convinced…however, it will be larger than ever.”

His reasoning follows the thinking of many analysts and carmakers that cars and other vehicles will not be mechanical devices and instead will be computing devices that are software-defined and programmed. 

 The computers inside AVs will not be normal robotics computers, he explained. “They will have sensors inputs and processing in real time but have to be designed for safety resilience.  Vehicles “will be the first large robotics market…and highly robotic.”

Development of coming vehicles will require effective computer vision technology to detect lanes and obstacles as well as training models with a digital twin to test new software to avoid putting vehicles on the street for testing. There will also be computers and SoCs to run all the parts: computers in the cloud for data generation, data center computers for training and Omniverse digital twins and four Orin computers inside a vehicle.

Nvidia announced at GTC 2022 this week that it will ship in 2026 its Drive Hyperion 9 software running on the upcoming Drive Atlan SoC to double the performance of the current Drive Orin-based SoC.  Also, Nvidia announced BYD of Shenzhen, China, will adopt Orin computers for EVs headed into production in the first half of 2023.  Lucid Motors also has revealed its DreamDrive Pro ADAS is being built on Nvidia Drive.

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Drive is now used by eight of 10 robotaxi makers, seven of 10 autonomous trucking companies and 20 of 30 passenger EVs, Nvidia said. Nvidia products are also used in 28 of 30 AV data centers.

A rich set of components and sensors will be needed to support the software and processors that Nvidia and competitors provide.  For example, Hyperion 9 from Nvidia will support, in each vehicle, 14 cameras, 9 radars, 3 lidars and 20 ultrasonics.  It will also support three cameras and one radar inside each vehicle for occupant sensing.  By comparison, Hyperion 8’s sensor suite encompasses 12 cameras, 9 radars, 12 ultrasonics and one front-facing sensor and one lidar for collecting ground-truth data.

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